ABSTRACT
Skeptics are dogged doubters. This chapter considers contextualists' response to external world skepticism—and shows how they try to improve on foundationalism. Real doubts are contextual, and this makes skeptical doubts unreal. According to contextualists, there is no independent fact like that. Justification is context-relative. Whether a specific doubt is real for contextualists depends on their context of inquiry. If they are surrounded by skeptics, it can seem important to justify. According to contextualists, then, skeptical doubts are not real. They are illusions of doubt, appearances of doubting that do not really capture the doubt they seem to capture. This reasoning also reveals contextualism's response to the skeptical regress problem. A contextually special belief is an unjustified justifier. Contextualists end the regress with basic beliefs. Unlike foundationalists, though, they do not think of basic beliefs as basic knowledge. Basic beliefs are not justified and not knowledge.
